More Language of
Commercial Services

BILLIONS. THAT’S THE HOOK FOR JUST ABOUTevery discussion about commercialservices these days — those bigbuckets of cash, just waiting to behauled in.

How big? The market for metroEthernet services is projected to attract$40.2 billion by 2014; cable’sshare of that could be as high as$10 billion (citing data from VerticalSystems).

And that’s about the only thing that’ll get yourpulse up. If you haven’t yet wandered into to thebusiness of serving businesses, know going inthat it’s as dry as sawdust. Jargon? Maybe a little.Here’s a sampling, from a recent batch of notes:“Since devices can have multiple Ethernet virtualcircuits running across them, they may each havedifferent logical MEGs — because you wouldn’twant MEPs for customer A’s service to be able tocollect data from customer B’s EVC.” Heavens no!

Let’s start at the beginning, using DOCSIS as theconversational foundation. We mostly know DOCSISas the specification for cable modems that serveresidences with broadband services. But it’s alsounder heavy tweak to be a foundational technologyfor serving businesses with connectivity.

What do businesses need that householdstypically don’t? For starters, guarantees. SLAs, asthey’re called, for Service Level Agreements. Thatmeans they want to assurances about throughput— are my data moving at the rate of speed I purchased?— and overall network availability.

They want to be able to monitor and receiveproof against things like frame delay, and frameloss. “Frame” is a term from the carrier world,meaning groups of digital packets associated withlinking one local area network (LAN), to another. Soframe delay indicates the time it takes to get fromthe place where data is transmitting, to the placewhere it ends up. Frame loss counts how manypackets are dropped or damaged en route.

Which brings us back (kind of) to the jargonsentence. Loosely translated, it means this:When you’re linking businesses with “virtualized”(cloud-based) Ethernet services, you want tomake sure the professional-grade cable modemsassociated with the local State Farm offices don’thave visibility into those serving the pizza chain.

The good news: Those buckets of cash are real.Comcast, Cox Communications and Time WarnerCable surpassed $1 billion (individually) last year, interms of revenue collected from businesses.

Which means it’s probably time to elbow past thedullness of the commercial services scene. Dig in,learn the lingo, bring in the haul. It’ll be fun.